July - Poem 1

Quiver Theory / Clayre Benzadon

-after Marilyn Hacker

I was trying to keep my main hand
steady, but I couldn’t help it; the cry
that burst out of me was a monster. I
shook widely, wildly, I lost it, loose. And
then came the aftersniffles. I was full
of trembles, like lightning. Now, I come
home to a wreckage: papers everywhere, sum
of what they call disaster. I feel beautiful
in this chaos. I almost cry again, breast
heavy with a vibrating sensation of want. To be
as elastic as static makes my hair stand up. Trust me,
all I ask for is to be as animate as the last
time I quivered, without a tongue
having to get me there. Let me, unprompted, come—

I did not use the internet to write this poem  / RJ Ingram

Congratulations your application is still being processed you’re on hold to speak with a representative & there are thirty two people ahead of you in line / This is the vacation you’ve waited for the forty-five minutes of freedom you wouldn’t normally have on a Tuesday in the early afternoon / A godsend a respite a gosh darn miracle / The dryer broke so go-ahead & hang the sheets in the yard & when the neighbor boy asks what you’re doing just say some analog shit & blow him a kiss / When the car is in the shop take the bus & get to work an hour early & watch the bag boys get ready for their shift / Watch them take the paper sacks from their boxes watch them shine their rainbow buttons with their dirty T-shirts watch them click their clicky pens like they’re betting on a winner / When the basement floods take an inventory of the unneeded & when the roof leaks befriend every bucket in the house even if it’s not a bucket / The stock pot becomes a bucket the extra cat litter pan becomes a bucket heck even the paint bucket get’s to be a bucket / The world is an unblemished apple / Spinning so fast the pitcher can’t miss it / When he hits the apple the crowd screams & when the bat smashes it the crowd screams & when the worms come up to eat what’s left the crowd screams / I reached for my phone to make a call this morning but realized time works differently now that you’re gone / Things tend to end before they get going which seems to upset everyone else on the carousel / But not me no not me I’ve still got a trunk full of tokens. Hi-yah! 

Melancholic Music Takes Me Back to Sacramento Where I Discovered Fatalism or Something Like It / MeraBaid Kaur

(after listening to NPR's Tiny Desk: Chelsea Wolfe 2016)

My husband says we are all capable of anything, and he believes this, because the rhythm has hovered near the stamen never landing, but the waiving vibration of air wafts in, nostalgia enters the olfactory, the stimuli has been stimulated, response simulated, but its not response, its reflex, it is scents stacked on scents, stacked on scents and multiplied–magnified beneath the sweat that collects in the crevice of any old flap of unexposed skin.

You can’t hear the hovering hum, but you imagine it, you feel it stirring in the navel center where you were once attached to your mother’s lack thereof, there, of course was nothing specific to ingest, just waves of movement giving you fullness, not in language nor volume, in emotion, hers and yours and yours from long ago, and yours from later on and yours from the beginning of time that wasn’t yours, that wasn’t hers, but was.

It’s a choir, a resonant dissonance, it does not bring you chills, it chisels them into your soul, and they grow into notches along the shaft of your hair, it gets deeper now, don’t be fooled by calling it darker, it is not dark, it is pale and stark, your eyes squint to sift through all the light, you turn and eventually shut them tight. 

The ocean of night, wrapped around each drive into town, windows down, the high hangs on from all the other highs before it, vegan sushi from the co-op, where I’d happen upon future stars, knowing they would be someday. I possessed their songs in a painful remembrance perfumed in infancy. Twenty-one was a rip tide I’ve learned to wade in, the shoreline kaleidoscoping around me forever in this sinking symphony.

lights ou / Kes Maro

new river deltas bound in rounded rectangles. creased
sketchbook pages folded into the corner of the couch i
circle closed pieces of land, neatly fitting, but not
touching. negative space rivers, all that nothing enmeshed.
so often i want to be in the world this way, not touching,
fitting. is it taps that plays at night? before sunset,
the coyotes chime in, throwing their voices up matching
bugle tones, entering staggered resolving after the horn
’s measure. the land knows the base by its noise.
the proximity of planes over head, the horn in the morning
and night, sometimes jets breaking sound
barriers. terror doesn’t build
in the air here like elsewhere. nothing has ever fallen
from these planes and decimated a cul-de-sac.
i want the land to feel tight or i think it should be
more like, the way it felt one time driving over the border
into the six counties, how the land rations its breath
under the union jack’s greedy lungs filling in every window, 
or that it should be tenser than that. but the trees here
don’t feel worried. i’m not building
towards saying the base exists peacefully. really, i just
want to tell you about the coyotes, how they love
music, but there’s this landscape holding them
that can't be drawn over. i can't stop thinking
about where these planes go when they leave. 

How Long Until You’re Gone Too? / Azmia Ricchuito

When you are filled with a longing
For places you’ll never know
Always looking for home
You can never find it in people
With their coming and going
Everyone you ever loved
Will one day be lost to you
Do you start grieving the day you say hello?
Or do you take a chance
That this time you’ve arrived
And put out a welcome mat
And flowers at the dinner table
Building bricks from the ashes of longing
Knowing you are finally home

 Madness Has Some Nerve / Tammy Smith

Showing up unannounced
on a jam-packed NJ Transit bus,
halfway to New York City,
three hours before seeing
Girl, Interrupted
Off-Broadway in the Village.

How dare she block the aisle
with heavy bags,
causing weary-eyed riders
to trip over her belongings
on their way to seats
they already paid for.

Madness doesn’t care
about sweaty feet
tight inside loose shoes,
or pity worn-out soles
stuck in place.

Nothing matters.
Not this quicksand I’m in,
not this labyrinth I’m walking.

Not my therapist’s warning
when he insists
madness is what I manifest
to pass the time.

In the theater lobby,
I watch red-haired wild women
mingle and wait
for the show to start.

Sylvia Plath devotees.
Anne Sexton wannabes.
Hysterics.
Her Kind.
Mine, too.

Not to mention the nun
nestled in the corner,
needing salvation.

Doesn’t everyone?

After the show,
on my way back to Port Authority,
when the subway doors won’t close
and racist remarks spill
from a passenger’s lips
like loose change—
I’m reminded of the older Asian man
who sat in the front row beside me
and confessed he, too,
was a mental patient
back in the sixties.

How turbulent that time was,
not unlike this ride home.

Wilder, Be  / Daphne Stanford

After Lucie-Brock Broido

As in startlement: birds flying dark toward
bewilderment. Emily sought fortitude: wander-

lust, purplings most wild, more purported than
possible. And wild to hold, and wild to shame:

field of larkspur & purple thistle. Dandelions 
blowing seed toward wandering lambs, velvet

nostrils fixated upon moors, traversed: first by 
Emily, then LBB, who wrote herself into E’s hand.

Notwithstanding, removing the tops of heads 
necessitates a refusal to deny bewilderment. 

Master, grant fortitude to grovel toward trails
untraversed: black olive, oak, maple & birch; tree 

trunks guarding lambs huddled in copse-woods.
…And wild to wreathe, and wild to tame: forest & 

fogged-up windowpane, notwithstanding. Be-
come wilder than the wind. (David was here, too.)